Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.

E.M. Forster -- A Room With A View

But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

That was the shibboleth—the cry by which she sounded the closed depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a woman’s insatiate vanity.

Zane Grey -- The Call of the Canyon

As her brain clouded over, as the memory of the views grew dim and the words of the book died away, she returned to her old shibboleth of nerves.

E.M. Forster -- A Room With A View

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A formula, a shibboleth meaningless as a child’s game, performed by someone created by the situation whose need it answered: a crone mumbling in a dungeon lighted by a handful of burning hair, something in a tongue which not even the girls themselves understand anymore, maybe not even the crone herself, rooted in nothing of economics for her or for any possible progeny since the very fact that we acquiesced, suffered the farce, was her proof and assurance of that which the ceremony…

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

He was gone; I did not even know that either since there is a metabolism of the spirit as well as of the entrails, in which the stored accumulations of longtime burn, generate, create and break some maidenhead of the ravening meat; ay, in a second’s time,—yes, lost all the shibboleth erupting of cannot, will not, never will in one red instant’s fierce obliteration.

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict.